ess, the transcendence of the Almighty. To this end I would use
whatever outward aids time and experience have shown will strengthen
and deepen the spiritual understanding. I should not fear to use
the cross, the sacraments, the kneeling posture, the great picture,
the carving, the recitation of prayers and hymns, not alone to
intensify this sense in the believer but equally to create it in the
non-believer. The external world moulds the internal, even as the
internal makes the external. If these things mean little in the
beginning, there is still truth in the assertion of the devotee that
if you practice them they will begin to mean something to you. This is
not merely that a meaning will be self-induced. It is more than that.
They will put us in the volitional attitude, the emotional mood, where
the meaning is able to penetrate. Just as all the world acknowledges
that there is an essential connection between good manners and good
morals, between military discipline and physical courage, so there
is a connection between a devotional service and the gifts of the
spiritual life. Such a service not merely strengthens belief in
the High and Holy One, it has a real office in creating, in making
possible, that belief itself.

We shall sum it all up if we say in one word that the offices of
devotion emphasize the cosmic character of religion. They take us out
of the world of moral theism into the world of a universal theism.
They draw us away from religion in action to religion in itself;
they give us, not the God of this world, but the God who is from
everlasting to everlasting, to whom a thousand years are but as
yesterday when it is past and as a watch in the night. Thus they help
us to make for ourselves an interior refuge into whose precincts
no eye may look, into whose life no other soul may venture. In that
refuge we can be still and know that He is God. There we can eat the
meat which the world knoweth not of, there have peace with Him. It
is in these central solitudes, induced by worship, that the vision
is clarified, the perspective corrected, the vital forces recharged.
Those who possess them are transmitters of such heavenly messages;
they issue from them as rivers pour from undiminished mountain
streams. Does the world's sin and pain and weakness come and empty
itself into the broad current of these devout lives? Then their
fearless onsweeping forces gather it all up, carry it on, cleanse and
purify it in the pr